Third generation wireless communication standards, such as UMTS-FDD, UMTS-TDD, IS2000, and TD-SCDMA, operate at very high frequencies. Modems (transceivers) for 3G mobile communication standards such as UMTS require approximately 100 times more digital signal processing power than GSM. It is desired to implement a transceiver for such standards using a programmable architecture in order to be able to deal with different standards and to be able to flexibly adapt to new standards. A known approach to improving performance is to store multiple data elements (scalars) in one line of a memory and operate on more than one data element at a time. Such systems are, for example, known as SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) or MIMD (multiple instruction, multiple data). A vector processor is an example of a SIMD processor. Typically, a wide memory has one port for enabling read and write access to units of at least one line of the memory. In the example, where the memory has a line width for storing a vector, one or more vectors can be read or written at a time. No special provision is available for accessing smaller units than a vector. For optimal use of a memory it is desired to be able to also access smaller data elements than those having the full width of a memory line in an efficient way. Conventionally, such a smaller unit can be stored in a line of the memory where part of the line is not used, increasing storage costs. Alternatively, smaller units may be stored in one line in a concatenated form, where an entire line needs to be read or written and additional processing instructions and cycles are required to extract or insert a desired smaller unit form the entire memory line. This reduces the performance. These problems become more acute where the width of the memory significantly exceeds the size of the smaller unit. For example, data elements storing components of a speech feature vector for speech recognition are typically 8 to 16 bits wide. For telephony, the coded/modulated data elements are usually 8 bits (or 2*8 bits for complex values). There is no need to increase this size. For newer telephony systems or increased speech recognition performance, it is desired to improve the speed of processing. Using wider memories to increase the processing speed can, without special measures, increase the amount of memory required for storing data or even slow-down certain forms of memory access as described above.